Anthony Stadlen is a Daseinsanalyst, existential psychotherapist and family therapist, supervisor and teacher working in London. He is also founder and convenor of the Inner Circle Seminars: an international, interdisciplinary, ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. This blogsite contains details of therapy and of past and future seminars. For therapy or seminars contact Anthony Stadlen at: +44(0)20 8888 6857, +44(0)7809 433 250, or stadlen@aol.com.

Emmanuel Lévinas (30 December 1905– 25 December 1995) was a highly original 20th-century philosopher. He introduced Husserl and Heidegger to France, and revered Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), but asked how Heidegger’s philosophy had in 1933 allowed him to embrace National Socialism. Lévinas’s extraordinary book Totality and Infinity (1961) was his answer. He urged that more primordial than ‘Being’ was the Face of the Other. The Face means: ‘Love your neighbour’, ‘Love the stranger’, ‘Care for the widow and the orphan’, ‘Do not murder’. Philosophy, said Lévinas, should tremble before the infinity of the Other, not subsume him or her in the totality of the Same. How does Lévinas’s thinking differ from that of Freud, Buber, Heidegger, von Hildebrand, Stein, Sartre and others? What is its relevance to the everyday practice of psychotherapy? We devoted Inner Circle Seminar No. 97 (22 January 2006) to Lévinas’s work as a whole, but today we shall focus on Totality and Infinity, 50 years on. Your contribution to the discussion will be welcome.

The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.